"The story of Electronic Music, from the sound experiments of the 1950s through the digital revolution to today, is one of invention and innovation. Developed with a team of electronic musicians, our exhibition charts this history with examples of music making technology spanning more than 50 years. ...

The story begins with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Electronic Music Studios (EMS), two organisations that broke musical boundaries in the postwar years. Objects from this era include the EMS VCS3, the first portable synthesiser.

Also on display is the Oramics Machine, a revolutionary music synthesiser that was created in the 1960s by Daphne Oram, founder of the Radiophonic Workshop. Daphne created this visionary machine that could transform drawings into sound, and it was recently acquired by the Science Museum in co–operation with Goldsmiths, University of London."

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"Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003) is one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Early in her career she declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a "music balancer" at the BBC, and as co–founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she is credited with the invention of a new form of sound synthesis – Oramics. Not only is this one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, it is noteworthy for being audiovisual in nature – i.e. the composer draws onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlay a series of photo–electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency, and duration.This system was a key part of early BBC Radiophonic Workshop practice. However, after Daphne left the BBC (in 1959), her research, including Oramics, continued in relative secrecy."

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"This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Radiophonic Workshop, the BBC's experimental unit for electronic sound. It also marks the 10th anniversary of the workshop's death after a long period of decline. But almost as soon it was gone, it began to assume cult status. A Radiophonic ghost began to haunt the peripheries of pop culture, audible initially as an influence on 'retrofuturist' groups such as Boards of Canada, Broadcast and Add N to (X). In the past five years, there has been a steady flow of Radiophonic–related reissues from labels such as Mute, Rephlex, Glo–Spot and Trunk; a BBC4 documentary, Alchemists of Sound; and a South Bank symposium organised by Saint Etienne's Bob Stanley. There have been two plays about the workshop's Delia Derbyshire, and when Doctor Who was relaunched in 2005, unfavourable comparisons were made between the Radiophonic team's original electronic music and the orchestrated flatus of Murray Gold's updated version. This summer, the Southbank Centre held a symposium on Daphne Oram, the workshop's co–founder, and there was news about the discovery of a huge cache of unreleased material by Derbyshire, the workshop's most brilliant composer. In November, Mute is set to issue a double CD compilation, 50th Anniversary Retrospective, including nuggets never before released."